Docsee

Overview

Docsee is a lightweight, open-source Docker management tool that gives you both a desktop GUI and a terminal TUI — powered by a shared Rust core. It's everything Docker Desktop should be: fast, small, and free.

The Challenge

Docker Desktop is slow, heavy (2GB+), and requires a paid license for commercial use. The command line is powerful but not visual. There's a gap: developers need a fast, lightweight way to manage containers without the bloat.

Before vs After

Architecture

My Approach

The architecture splits into three layers:

Rust Core communicates with the Docker daemon through the Bollard library — async Rust bindings for the Docker Engine API. Every operation (list, start, stop, inspect, logs) completes in under 50ms. The core handles all Docker interactions and exposes a clean API to both interfaces.

Desktop GUI uses Tauri + Svelte. Tauri gives us a native window with web technologies inside, but without Electron's overhead. The entire GUI binary is ~8MB — compared to Docker Desktop's 2GB+. Svelte keeps the frontend reactive and fast.

Terminal TUI uses Ratatui for rich terminal rendering. It's for power users who never leave the terminal. Real-time container stats (CPU, memory, network, disk I/O) stream directly in the terminal with instant updates.

Both interfaces share the same Rust core, so behavior is identical regardless of which one you use. GitHub Actions handles CI/CD with automated multi-platform releases for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Key Decisions

Why Rust over Go? Go would have been the obvious choice for Docker tooling — Docker itself is written in Go. But Rust's async model (tokio) gives genuinely better performance for the kind of concurrent operations Docker management requires. And the memory safety guarantees mean no runtime crashes from null pointers or data races.

Why Tauri over Electron? Binary size. An Electron app starts at ~150MB minimum. Tauri starts at ~3MB. For a tool that's supposed to replace bloatware, shipping our own bloatware would be ironic.

Why both GUI and TUI? Different workflows need different interfaces. When I'm deep in terminal work, I don't want to context-switch to a GUI. When I'm doing visual container management, I want to see everything at a glance. Both are first-class citizens.

Results

Sub-50ms response times for all container operations. An 8MB desktop app that does what a 2GB app does. A 3MB terminal tool that makes Docker management feel native. Automated releases across three platforms on every tag push.